education

After weeks of private negotiations, Senate Republicans unveiled their Better Care Reconciliation Act, their proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act. Florida has more at stake in this debate than any other state and South Florida alone has more than 600,000 people signed up for individual coverage through the ACA this year.

Today we're going to update a story we first brought you back in 2004. That September, NPR set out to document what may be the most important day in any young child's life — the first day of kindergarten. For parents it's a day filled with hope, anxiety and one big question: Is our child ready?

The answer back then, as far as 5-year-old Sam Marsenison was concerned, was, "No, no, no!"

In the 2014-2015 school year, Madison Middle School in Miami reported 55 fights to the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE)—nearly one for every three days school was in session. The very next year, that number fell to zero, even though one fight made the news after a student landed in the hospital with a broken jaw.

Ahead of last week's three-day special session, the state's top legislative leaders -Gov. Rick Scott, House Speaker Richard Corcoran and Senate President Joe Negron- appeared to have reached an agreement about public spending in the new fiscal year.

With anti-Semitic incidents on the rise in Florida, Jewish day schools are stepping up security with the promise of new funding from the state.

Gov. Rick Scott visited Brauser Maimonides Academy in Fort Lauderdale on Tuesday to highlight the measure. It’s one of 35 private Jewish schools in the state that will share the $650,000 grant in this year’s budget.

A school district near Houston has apologized after a 13-year-old student received an award declaring her "Most Likely to Become a Terrorist."

The award was one of several "insensitive and offensive fake mock awards," the Channelview Independent School District said in a statement, and the teachers in question have been disciplined, KHOU in Houston reports.

At 43 years old, Katina Johnson is planning her high school graduation party. It's been about thirty years since she dropped out of middle school when she found out she was pregnant.

Even before then, though, she'd never had a stable education. Her mother was addicted to drugs and moved her around a lot before she died when Johnson was just 12 years old. "That was the last time I even seen the inside of a school," she says.

A group of middle schoolers from Brownsville got a behind-the-scenes look at the Third District Court of Appeal in Miami on Tuesday, along with the chance to run the place long enough to hold mock arguments in a case about school security.

President Donald Trump embarks on his first overseas trip since taking office visiting Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Vatican before meeting with NATO and the G7. The trip comes as foreign policy talk has been dominated by scandal surrounding the alleged administration links with Russia.

Gov. Rick Scott faces mounting pressure from school superintendents, teachers unions and parent groups to veto $23.7 billion in base funding to K-12 public schools next year — as well as a controversial $419 million education policy bill, which lawmakers unveiled and passed in the span of just three days at the end of their annual session.

A rejection of the main education funding alone would force lawmakers back to Tallahassee for a special session to redo that part of the budget, which is almost a third of the $82.4 billion in overall state spending approved for 2017-18.